Pytheas Online

An examination of issues of civilization and conflict.

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

The Joys of Indiscriminate Immigration

Since 1965, the U.S. has opened its borders indiscriminately to the world, allowing in peoples from entirely alien nations and cultures - many of them openly hostile to America and Western Civilization. The result has been predictable. And now we have yet another perfect example of the great benefits such policies have brought to the American people.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The AIDS virus invaded the United States in about 1969 from Haiti, carried most likely by a single infected immigrant who set the stage for it to sweep the world in a tragic epidemic, scientists said on Monday.

Michael Worobey, a University of Arizona evolutionary biologist, said the 1969 U.S. entry date is earlier than some experts had believed.

The timeline laid out in the study led by Worobey indicates that HIV infections were occurring in the United States for roughly 12 years before AIDS was first recognized by scientists as a disease in 1981. Many people had died by that point.

"It is somehow chilling to know it was probably circulating for so long under our noses," Worobey said in a telephone interview.

The researchers conducted a genetic analysis of stored blood samples from early AIDS patients to determine when the human immunodeficiency virus first entered the United States.

They found that HIV was brought to Haiti by an infected person from central Africa in about 1966, which matches earlier estimates, and then came to the United States in about 1969.

The researchers think an unknown single infected Haitian immigrant arrived in a large city like Miami or New York, and the virus circulated for years -- first in the U.S. population and then to other nations.

Haiti has long been the most dysfunctional nations in the Western Hemisphere, perennially beset by shocking violence and bloodshed long after its people threw off colonialism and proceeded to slaughter each other amidst their own squalor. No sane nation would have permitted any immigration from Haiti. But then, the U.S. immigration policy hasn't been sane - nor operating in America's national interest - since Ted Kennedy managed to get his hands on it in 1965.